'The Lucky One' or 'The Notebook': Which has the hotter love scene?

The Lucky One, the new Nicholas Sparks adaptation starring Zac Efron, finished second at the box office last weekend. While critics may not have loved it, CinemaScore participants (76 percent of which were female, 52 percent under the age of 25), gave it a B+. Why? We know exactly what we’re getting when we go see a Nicholas Sparks movie, so our expectations are only high when it comes to the scenery, the love scenes, and the guys. To quote my 64-year-old mother, who saw the movie the day it opened, “Zac Efron is a sweet and sensual sexy, not animalistic.” (Yes, she phoned to tell me this as she left the theater.)

So, there’s really only one debate to have here: Are the love scenes in The Lucky One hotter than the love scenes in The Notebook? We’ll put it to a vote below.

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I found TheLucky One sufficiently steamy. That Efron’s Logan would have a romantic mosquito net over his bed in his bare-bone Louisiana woods cabin is more believable than the idea that he would walk from Colorado to Louisiana with his dog. But the post-outdoor shower sex scene was a bit too slickly produced to feel as natural and genuinely intimate as The Notebook’s post-rain romp. The Lucky One scene I’d like to see again is the power outage makeout session.* It was a simple shot, so you could focus on the heat, and it was a surprise, since we hadn’t seen it in the trailer for months.